Abstract

Investigations of a mental calculation expert's memory. Summary. In this article investigations of a mental calculation expert are described, which are concerned with various components of his working memory as well as with long-term remembering of numbers. The most important results are:
1) Not the frequency of memorizing, but the quality of processing determines long-term remembering.
2) The expert either does not instruct himself to forget or does not utilize cues to forget. In spite of that there was no evidence for proactive inhibition.
3) Retroactive inhibition was shown when active processing was impossible.
4) In Sternberg's paradigm the expert processes more digits than consonants per sec. Only with respect to digits the expert processes faster than other subjects.
5) The memory span for digits is large, for letters average. The digit span is not determined by a limited number of chunks but by the number of digits which can be processed within a limited space of time. This time seems to be larger than the one of other subjects.
6) The symbolic distance effect for digits and letters was shown to be valid for all subjects. Only the expert's comparison of numbers is less time-consuming than the comparison of other subjects.
The results are discussed with respect to his computational abilities which he has demonstrated independent of these investigations (Bredenkamp, 1989).